Madonna is 'role model for Tory women'

MADONNA, the provocative pop icon and mother of two, is a role model for women, including female Conservative MPs, her stepmother-in-law said yesterday.

Shireen Ritchie, stepmother of Guy Ritchie, the film director, held up the singer as an example to aspiring women politicians as she prepared to tell the Conservatives how to transform their image.

"Madonna is a role model in the sense that you have got to go out and get what you want in all areas of life, and that could be applied to Conservative politics," she said.

Mrs Ritchie, chairman of the Kensington and Chelsea Conservative Association, has initiated a meeting with David Davis, the Tory chairman, this week to discuss the Tories' perennial problem: shortage of females. Part of the problem lay in encouraging women to come forward.

"I agreed with the Labour Party when they used all-women shortlists and the success of that was clear," Mrs Ritchie said. Iain Duncan Smith has ruled out such a move.

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Mrs Ritchie says she "never discussed politics with Madonna". Mere mention of the singer is certain to excite Conservative strategists, desperate for the political endorsement of pop's must successful female artist.

Some even claim to have spotted signs that she is, in Lady Thatcher's phraseology, "one of us".

Her song, Material Girl, was, said one, "true Thatcherism" and a hymn to capitalism and prudence. Another suggested the precise meaning of her 1986 hit Papa Don't Preach was an "attack on the Nanny state. She must hate Tony Blair's preachiness."